I won't sugarcoat it.

Last weekend I attended a virtual retreat on chronic pain led by Nicole Sachs, LCSW. Based on the work of Dr. John Sarno, she teaches a simple and effective practice for healing chronic pain that involves journaling your truest emotions and sitting in meditation. As a chronic pain sufferer, I can say: it is working.

On her podcast, Nicole often says that life is a choice between what hurts and what hurts worse. This principle applies both to chronic pain and to decluttering. We can either live with the pain (e.g. the way clutter makes us feel) or we can do the work to improve, which itself can often be hard and emotionally taxing.

I won’t sugarcoat it. Sometimes digging into our clutter and being faced with the emotions it might bring up—not to mention creating the time in our schedules to do it—can be a challenge. It can feel like these actions are going to “hurt”. But what hurts worse? Doing nothing, or doing the work that leads to freedom and relief? May we all choose the latter.

Sachs also talks about how there is no magical “third option" with chronic pain. There’s no reality where we don’t do the work and everything somehow feels fine. Similarly, we can’t not dig into our clutter, not take the action, and expect to magically feel better about it. Yet we humans love to put things off and trick our brains into thinking, 'Oh, if I just sweep this under the rug—sometimes literally—it’ll disappear.' It won’t.

Now, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t times when life's other priorities take precedence. If your kid is sick, your cluttered kitchen can probably wait until they’re feeling better. And even in those times, making conscious choices about what is most important to us can lighten the load, release us from guilt, and declutter our minds and hearts.

With so much out of our control right now, I want to do everything in my power to persevere—even if that journey feels a little worse before it feels better.